October 08, 2009

Party in the Old Dude's Room!

And you thought being a college athletic director was all about entertaining rich alums at cocktail parties before home football games.

Add tapping a keg with students to the job description.

New Marshall athletic director Mike Hamrick, who was hired in July, is living in a residence hall until he finds a permanent place to live.

Hamrick, 52, eats pizza and watches games with other students in the dorm lounge and spends Sunday afternoons doing laundry.

"I feel like Rodney Dangerfield," he told Kerissa Bennett of The Parthenon. "To be honest, it's made me feel young. I graduated [from Marshall] in 1980 and living in the dorm makes me feel like I never left."

But there are moments he feels old.

"I've gotten to know a lot of the RAs, where they're from, what they’re majoring in," he said. "One of them, I went to school with her mother here."

Hamrick was the athletic director at Nevada Las Vegas and he plans to move out of the dorm at the end of the semester when his wife arrives in Huntington.